John Webster, born around 1580 and probably dead by about 1632, occupies a singular place in English Renaissance drama. He is remembered above all as the author of The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, tragedies whose violent plots, dense imagery, and moral unease have made them enduring fixtures of the theatrical canon. Yet the familiar image of Webster as a solitary poet of skulls, stranglings, poison, and corr…
“A great part of the grace of this, I confess, lay in action; yet can no action ever be gracious, where the decency of the language, and ingenious structure of the scene, arrive not to make up a perfect harmony.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Dramatic Poets, Elizabethan Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony
Thomas Heywood, born about 1574 and buried on 16 August 1641, was one of the great working writers of the English Renaissance: a playwright, actor, poet, translator, prose controversialist, civic pageant-maker, and indefatigable observer of London life. He has never possessed the singular cultural monumentality of William Shakespeare, nor the sharply defined authorial reputation of Ben Jonson, yet this apparent eclip…
“He that denies then theatres should be, he may as well deny a world to me.”
Neighbourhood:
Dramatic Poets, Elizabethan Poets, Love Poets, Lute-Song Composers, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Longing, Sensuality
